In 1951, a famine devastated India and the world community expressed alarm and compassion. The famous violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, contacted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, volunteering to perform throughout India in early 1952 to raise money for the famine victims. Before Menuhin, Western classical music was a rarity in India. Heifetz and Kubelík (father of the conductor Rafael Kubelík) were probably the only Western violinists who had visited India. Menuhin befriended the sitar player Ravi Shankar on his arrival in New Delhi. In Bombay, [Zubin Mehta's father] Mehli [Mehta] was given the job of arranging the tour for Menuhin, a task which he undertook with much pleasure and enthusiasm. Assisting him in organising the tour was none other than eminent scientist Bhabha, who was an accomplished piano and violin player. According to Prof. Gustav Born, son of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, who was a friend, Bhabha played one of two violin parts in Johann Sebastian Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D Minor at a party in his own home. The other part, Prof. Gustav said, was played by "the delightful leader of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra by the name of Mehli Mehta".

Mehli, Menuhin and Menuhin's pianist travelled all over India. Mehli requested Menuhin to play a few benefit concerts with his orchestra and the maestro readily agreed...

To cut down on rehearsal time, Mehli decided that he would play the violin solos himself as they practised. Seeing the orchestra struggle without a leader, Zubin picked up the baton and took his father's place in conducting Brahms's E Minor Violin Concerto. That experience changed his life. [Bombay String Quartet member George] Lester recalled that the moment Zubin got on to the podium, he took command, gave them their correct cues and "put us all under his spell". The first step in what was destined to be a glittering international career had just been taken.

Zubin says that the first time he conducted in public was when he accompanied Mehli for a radio advertisement in Bombay, playing the Concerto in A Minor by Bach. He conducted a chamber orchestra from memory as he was fully acquainted with the music. Zubin called it a great experience: making music with his father was in itself special.

In 1954, Menuhin returned to Bombay and once again Mehli's services as a musician were enlisted. Menuhin gave four concerts in Bombay with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, all under the baton of Mehli.

Mehli also played a role in introducing Menuhin to yoga guru B.K.S. Iyengar of Poona. Menuhin's chance discovery of yoga while sitting in a doctor's room in New Zealand had made him a convert and, when he visited New Delhi, he praised yoga as India's greatest contribution to the welfare of humanity. Before the welcome dinner, he and Prime Minister [Jawaharlal] Nehru engaged in a contest to see who could execute the more perfect headstand, much to the amusement of those present. Menuhin in his autobiography says that when challenged by Pandit Nehru, he stood on his head in a somewhat rickety and unsatisfactory manner, watched by Nehru's daughter, Indira, and sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

Nehru thought he could do much better and elegantly upended himself on the drawing room carpet. Both Menuhin and Nehru were on their heads when the butler threw open the door to announce dinner. Iyengar recalled that at first he had been allotted only two minutes to meet Menuhin at Bombay's Raj Bhavan. Considering that the journey from Poona took five hours in those days, he refused to come and it took all of Mehli's powers of persuasion to get him to agree. Those two minutes eventually ended up becoming forty-five, at the end of which Menuhin was hooked. His meeting with Iyengar made him a dedicated yoga practitioner for the rest of his life. He also wrote the Foreword to Iyengar's famous book, Light on Yoga. Iyengar's subsequent popularity in the West owed much to Menuhin's patronage. When I asked Zubin about Mehli introducing Iyengar to Menuhin, he said he too had heard of it but could not confirm it. Zubin had learned yoga from one of Iyengar's pupils (he could not recall his name) but gave it up when he went to Vienna at the age of eighteen.

It was becoming increasingly obvious to Zubin that his future lay in music. Unsurprisingly, when his anatomy teacher asked him to cut up a dogfish in a practical class, Zubin left the room with the words: "Cut it up yourself!" Zubin recalls, "Every time I sat down to cut up a dogfish, there I was with a Brahms symphony running through my head." It was clear to everyone that his medical career was ending even before it had started. Zubin told Mehli that he wanted to study music in Vienna where his cousin Dady - the only Mehta other than Mehli and Zubin interested in making music - was learning the piano under Bruno Seidlhofer at the Vienna Music Academy. Dady had initially been studying music in Paris but moved to Vienna when his teacher died. He used to write to Zubin about his experiences, musical and otherwise, only adding to the fire in Zubin's belly. Zubin too wanted to be a musician and tour the world...

But Zubin, even at that time, was clear in his mind that while his future lay in music, it would certainly not be as an instrumentalist. He had abandoned his violin when Mehli was in America and admits that he should have improved his piano playing but was often lured away by the charms of cricket. There is little doubt that Mehli was the primary musical influence on Zubin, especially after his return from America in 1949, until Zubin's departure for Vienna in 1954. Zubin told NDTV in September 2008, "He introduced me to orchestral works, to the orchestra as an instrument, talked about his four years in America, about the things he had heard, all the conductors he had admired - so it was an ongoing twenty-four-hours-a-day education."

[His brother] Zarin, who was the president and executive director of the New York Philharmonic, told Gilbert Kaplan in a radio interview in November 2005 that their father forbade them from making music their career. He had complied (only partially, opting out of accountancy to become a full-time music administrator), but was happy that Zubin had not followed that advice...

More importantly, Mehli and [mother] Tehmina also agreed that music was Zubin's calling and it would be criminal to foist any other career on him. Mehli recalled how Zubin had come to talk to him about his future when he was praying. Since it was unusual for him to be disturbed at this time, he knew Zubin wanted to tell him something important. "Daddy, I can't go on with medicine. I must quit because I'm a musician. I must go to Vienna and take up music." And so he did.

In October 1954, Zubin left for Vienna, a city that he calls his second home. The scene was now set for the first great chapter in the life of the eighteen-year-old. Vienna laid the musical foundation for his profession and, to this day, never fails to energise and inspire him. Zubin refers to the city as one of his spiritual homes, the other three being Los Angeles, Tel Aviv and Florence.

An excerpt from Zubin Mehta:

A Musical Journey by Bakhtiar K. Dababhoy; Published by Penguin Books India